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WordPress SEO Plugins

There are over 70 million WordPress-powered sites as of December 2012. Chances are that most of the SEOmoz community are currently running or working on a WordPress-powered website. I've noticed in recent months there has been some activity in the Q&A section about WordPress SEO help, which is why I put this roundup together. Here are 35 WordPress SEO Plugins that I have found useful over the years. These aren't in any specific order, but anything with a picture I highly recommend.

General SEO Plugins

Perhaps the most popular SEO plugin to date. WordPress SEO by Yoast allows you to easily setup page Title/Description templates for any post-type, create XML sitemaps, verify your Google and Bing webmaster tools accounts, and edit your .htaccess directly. And those are just some of the powerful features this plugin offers. Without trying to toot the guy's horn too much, this is a killer plugin that gets updated with new features all the time. Install this!

Scribe describes their plugin as "Scribe makes content marketing simple"; I can't disagree with that. The plugin helps you create better content. A couple bonus features that are nice are the keyword and link research tools that you can use straight from the WordPress editor.

All In One SEO Pack is another featured SEO plugin that many SEOs rely on. While it has many of the same features as the Yoast plugin, the options panel lacks behind a bit. If you upgrade to the pro version for $39, you can get some more extended features.

Another solid SEO plugin that allows you to easily edit titles and meta descriptions, verify Google Webmaster Tools, add Analytics code, and is available in 21 languages. One downfall for me is that it doesn't seem to have custom post-type support.

This is a great plugin for the non-technical SEO or beginner who doesn't know how to code. This plugin give you options to add your business information to your contact page, including a embedded Google map that can be linked to your Google+ Local account, with a link for users to leave a review.

Vibe SEO Pack is a pretty neat SEO plugin, it has some of the same features as All-In-One SEO Pack and Yoast. I don't have direct experience with this plugin, but the backend content score tool looks great, and it has 4.5/5 stars on WordPress.org.

You can probably guess what this plugin does, but I'll let you know anyways. SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt attribute and title tags to any images that do not have them. The options panel is easy to setup custom settings for your images. This plugin also has a premium version that gives you more features such as an images XML sitemap creator and more custom settings.

Another great feature of the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast is it's the only all-around plugin that includes a sitemap creator. However, I'm not a huge fan of this feature, and usually keep the functionality turned off in favor of the plugin above. It does have a video add-on for $89.

Content Optimization Plugins

I really like the simplicity of the content optimization tools in this plugin. You have the option of setting a "focus keyword" in the content editor, the plugin analyzes the content for your focus keyword and lets you know how many times your keyword has appeared in your copy, headlines, URL, images, etc. Another great feature is that the plugin gives you a live snippet of how your post will appear in Google, while also giving you warnings on title and description length.

It's pretty hard to not create better content with this plugin, the research and analysis tools this plugin provides are some of the best in the business, and all of that is done directly through the post editor. Without doubt this is the best content optimization plugin for WordPress, and one of the best all-around content tools around. The only downfall is that the plugin starts at $97/month.

The SEO Content Control plugin is a great tool for identifying weak content on your site. The options panel shows you an overview of all the pages and posts that may not have enough content and are missing meta descriptions. It also lets you create unique excerpts for your archive and category pages that are different than the single posts.

Link Tools & Reports

The SEOmoz Widgets plugin adds a backend panel to your dashboard to show you your inbound links and top pages; there is also a widget to display a list of incoming links. You must have API access for the plugin to work. It seems the plugin has not been updated in some time, but it still seems to be working. I would like to challenge any readers to re-develop this plugin.

If you have a credible blog that gets more than spam comments, you have to check this plugin out. The plugin exports the name, URL, and email address of each comment into an Excel file for you. Additionally, if you have access to the SEOmoz API, you can grab the domain and page authority for each URL.

This plugin integrates Google Analytics data straight into the dashboard. This shows you your top referrers, top pages, top incoming organic keywords, and more. Great plugin to get a quick analytics overview.

Another plugin that integrates Google Analytic data into your dashboard. This plugin has a little more options than Google Analyticator, you can install your tracking code from the settings page, view multiple graphs, and install widgets such as the most popular content widget that pulls in your top posts based on visits.

This plugin is a lifesaver for anyone who doesn't know how or doesn't want to edit their .htaccess file. You can create 301 redirects on the fly! Great plugin for anytime you are moving content or deleting old files. I have found it a lifesaver on small- to medium-sized sites that have just been converted to WordPress, just enter the old and new URL and you're all set!

Otherwise known as YARPP, this plugin automatically adds related posts to the end of your single blog posts. You have some template control straight from the backend options panel. If your comfortable editing your theme files, you can integrate the related posts directly in your theme.

This plugin allows you to search and replace strings in the WP database tables. I found this plugin super helpful on a project where I needed to mass change link URLs that were included in the page/post content editor.

This plugin will automatically replace text with links site-wide depending on the variables you set in the backend. In older versions of this plugin, you really had to be careful not to fill up your posts with links as the newer version only replaces the first variable of the word it finds.

Now integrated directly into the Yoast WP SEO Plugin, you can easily add breadcrumbs to your theme. There is an automatic integration option, but if your theme doesn't support that option, you can integrate the code manually into your theme files.

Social Media Plugins

This is a useful all-in-one sharing button. On rollover, the button lets you chose which social networks you want to share the content with and you can also share the content via email. Useful plugin if you want to offer your users a lot of sharing options, but don't want to clutter your design with a lot of buttons.

Sharebar adds a customizable vertical sharing box on the left side of a blog post, with an optional horizontal sharebar. This plugin is also very easy to add anywhere in your theme files or you can automatically include it.

Another great plugin to easily integrate social sharing buttons into your posts and pages. One of the main benefits of this plugin over some of the others is if you have a ShareThis account, you can track your sharing metrics.

Formerly known as "Sexybookmarks," this plugin is more than just a social sharing tool. This plugin also has a related content widget allowing users to explore other similar posts. While I would use YARPP over the related posts feature in this plugin, some might find it useful to have sharing options and related content options in one plugin.

This is a very cool plugin that adds a tabbed social media profile widget to your site. Right now it supports Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, RSS, and has a feature where you can add another tab and populate it with a shortcode.

The Social Metrics dashboard gives you an in-depth view on how many shares your pages and posts have. You can quickly filter by categories and months. Currently you can track performance on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, StumbleUpon, Digg, and LinkedIn.

Sweet, what next?

Well, that's all I have for you. Do you know and use any other WordPress SEO related plugins besides the ones I've listed here? I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions in the comments on any plugins I may have missed!

This roundup was intended to be a resource of tools you can include in your next SEO strategy. With that said, I've had many conversations with aspiring SEOs who mention something like "Yeah, I installed the XX SEO Plugin.... now I'm and SEO expert."Don't be one of those guys. Make sure you know what you are doing and take the time to properly setup and configure each plugin you install.

Comments
71

Love the post! We're always asking around about the best Wordpress plugins and this is an awesome list. Let me add a few of my own favorite.SEO SpecificGA for Wordpress - Google Analytics plugin by YoastBroken Link Checker - Automatically detects broken links on your site.Redirection - Performs simple 301 redirects, also logs any 404s so you can turn them into redirects.General Performance and Functionality

It's important for folks to keep in mind that not all plugins are compatible with all themes, and vice versa. But the majority of the ones you listed will probably work with the vast majority of themes out there.

Cyrus,Thanks for the comment, and the plugin contributions! I haven't heard of Broken Link Checker or Bulletproof Security, i'll have to check those out!Dynamic Widgets looks cool also, I usually use WP Page Widgets, which allows you to add different widgets on a page-by-page basis, can Dynamic Widgets handle that also?

The SEOmoz Widgets plugin adds a backend panel to your dashboard to
show you your inbound links and top pages; there is also a widget to
display a list of incoming links. You must have API access for the
plugin to work. It seems the plugin has not been updated in some time, but it still seems to be working. I would like to challenge any readers to re-develop this plugin.

In regards to the above I may have, in a roundabout way, already taken you up on the challenge. Hitting the task from a slightly different angle, I've recently hooked into the Mozscape API to add some great data to the familiar Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. You can find more info about my most recent efforts here and here. Also, I've exchanged emails with Joost and he did express a little bit of interest so we'll see if something like this makes its way right into his plugin :).

George, great stuff! I'm downloading your version of the plugin right now, i'll be sure to let you know any feedback I have. Have you thought about making it a stand-alone plugin that's not directly tied into the Yoast plugin? That way you could get it into the plugin repository by itself.

I had thought about it at first, but then wondered if it might be better to limit the number of plugins a person has to manage. It is something to think about though and may end up happening. Thanks for the kind words :).

Such a great list and I absolutely love Yoast Seo since my seo friend turned me onto it..I am so much better with ensuring readability and everything else it checks...broken link checker awsome and add to any..will try some of the others too. Casey, you put a lot of time into doing this and sharing so well for those who need it. thanks, ginny

This is an outstanding post sums up I like the way you told me about some plug-ins I did not know about all around great for everyone using WordPress which is probably most of us. I have added a couple extras down here with some advice of what I like and I agree with a lot of yours #2 scribe being a fantastic plug-in. Great jobI never saw a Akismet on the list excuse me if I'm wrong but here it is anyway. SEO purpose keep spam off your blog and all the bad things that go with it.http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sucuri-scanner/Not only scans your site extremely thoroughly on demand but can clean it up for you at a very small cost if needed however you do get free hardening something that could keep you from getting hacked in costing you a lot of time and money.1-Click HardeningIn our experience a high-percentage of the infections we see every day come from poor management on the end-user’s part. This feature uses common hardening measures that can be taken at any time and helps reduce infection risk.

its secure, because you can [hide your wordpressinstallation]{http://really-static-support.php-welt.net/comment-redirector-t9.html}

if you dont have PHP/MySQL support on your server you can host your wordpressinstallation local and use a normal HTML webspace for publishing

Gravity forms is a musthttp://www.gravityforms.com/ you can do much more with the example belowhttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/gravity-form

speed up your website on the front endhttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-less/ if you're running regular DNSSpeed up your website if running shared hosting and not using anycast DNS you can get quite a bit of freebies for security and a significant amount of speed if configured correctly using cloudflarehttp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cloudflare/ I Always use managed WordPress hosting however that's just me I installhttp://scribecontent.com/http://getpremise.com/ high highly suggest installing the raven tools plugin and remember if you're on a shared IP you are much better off setting up an SMTP relay to deal with your blog posts and e-mails coming off of your website. It will handle all of the SPF, sender ID, domain ID all that fun stuff cost you almost nothing and You will not be affected by your Web servers IP address nor will you affect it. I personally use DynECT light however they don't have a plug-in and charge for their base package.http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bigsendgrid/installation/ the reason I picked send good news they give you 200 free e-mails a month and have very competitive prices

Remember always use Akismet everything you see above except for reallystatic and cloudflare I hope I have been of some help to somebody. Respectfully, Thomas

I should probably just go with a nice generic comment about how useful this list is, but in reality it is only useful to the very new, it does not give insight into the usage and advantages of one plugin over another. For instance, since Yoast does so much, when would you not want Yoast? What are the disadvantages? Here is a freebie tip - Google Analytics For Wordpress recently added tracking to their plugin, and requests the ability to track your users. What they don't tell you is that the tracking cookie involves another HTTP call, and when I did the page load timeline it was seriously slow in loading, so watch out for this emerging negative trend in plug in development. One more Freebie tip - YARRP allows similiar posts and similiar pages - you just need to hit screen options from the plugin setting and enable the relatedness pool, and check those options out, makes it a whole different plugin. That's what I would like to see - in depth analysis. And, lastly, I am sorry for being so critical here, there is some good info as well, but stuff like reviewing the Vibe SEO pack without ever having used it? I'm just saying!!!

Your right, this post was put together for the users who are fairly new with using WordPress - hence the name "Roundup of 35...", not "Review of 35...". It's a resource for the community to use, share and add too.

The tracking in my GA for WP plugin (which is actually in my WP SEO plugin too) is actually not an extra call, but one call, once a week, from your server to my tracking. If it slows down your site more than that, by all means do drop me an email at joost @ my domain and we'll resolve that ASAP.

Wow, quite a list!It's great to see I'm already using some of the more obscure ones you mention. Also, it really goes to hit home how great Yoast's SEO plugin is.Another one I highly recommend is News SEO, especially for anyone who runs a news blog or website. Yep, it's from Yoast again but it works wonderfully.

Wow! It's always nice to see some Wordpress SEO Plugins! And you've included all the classics here. I'm glad you included the Local Search SEO Contact Page. This is a quick and easy way of getting your "contact" page marked up properly. I've personally found that Yoast's SEO Plugin is the "must have" and it's completely free. I like that he has integrated a lot of the features into the one plugin (such as Authorship, Breadcrumbs etc) and he seems to be very reliable at fixing bugs and keeping it up to date.

Awesome! This is a fantastic list. I'm always on the lookout for the latest and greatest tools. I have one question that may be obvious. Do you think using all the above plugins would create problems? Maybe Google wouldn't like it or something of that nature.

Many of the plugins listed here are offering different ways to achieve the same thing, so you don't need to install them all. Some can be used in conjunction, of course; I like using both AddThis to embed share buttons on the page, and ActiveShare to display an overlay when users have reached the end of a post.One important thing to keep in mind with plugins is that each can potentially open your site to security problems. Don't go overboard installing plugins just because they are free and sound cool, that could come back to bite you. You need to keep WordPress and your theme and plugin versions up-to-date, and I'd personally recommend limiting plugins to essentials only as not all developers are 100% conscientious in patching security issues. Yoast, however, is an example of a developer who does a great job of keeping plugin security up-to-date and like many others here I'd heartily recommend their WordPress SEO.

Thanks for this, I was just thinking that there would be potential clashes with different plugins all trying to take control of my titles and canonical tags but you got there first and clarified that you do not use them all at once.

Kool List,Thanks. i also coded 1 lil free sometime ago : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-head-section-cleaner/ wel it is not needed any more, this cleaning functionality is almost in all seo plugins now :p

Hey, great to hear that you've created this. Would you mind telling of the benefits of this? Cleaning the header? I've noticed that Yoasts plugin does this as well and always wondered how helpful it is for SEO.

This is a really helpful post and the comments are just as helpful. I agree with the positive comments about Yoast's SEO plugin and there are definitely some interesting tools here I am going to have to check out.

Nice round up. What I like about Yoast's is that is has the
functionality of what used to require several different plugins - title
templates, xml sitemaps (with image sitemap), htaccess, adding a link
back to your post in the RSS feed etc. There are also a number of plugins that can help speed up WP page load, caching, minifying, CDNs etc.

Hi CaseyThank you for taking the time to compile the list, I am sure many of the people who have just begun their exciting journey that is Wordpress usage will find it a good starting point.Do you have plans for a follow up where you list them in preference or rank them as to the ones you would recommend for different types of user?I do not mean to put more work on your plate after you have obviously put in a great deal of time already but I think it would be a good follow up as you have more experience over a number of plug ins tan most of us.All the bestSean

I personally wouldn't recommend installing BOTH of them. The reason: they both do the same things and it would get a bit messy (too many cooks situation) if you had both of them competing to do things. My own personal preference is to use Yoast's SEO plugin. It really does everything these days and he is constantly adding things to it (and it's free!). It can even setup "authorship" quite easily now, and manage sitemaps. Go for Yoast!

Thanks a lot. I will have to take a look at that plugin. The main ones that I use are "w3 Total Cache", Yoast SEO and Redirection (for redirects). I try to use as few as possible as we all know that having too many plugins can slow things down. Luckily, with Yoast SEO, it does so many things that you won't need all those external "single function" plugins.

Great list of useful plugins! I use Yoast for all of my WordPress developments. The only thing I don't like about most SEO plugins is the time that it takes to make small changes. The WP back-end can be so slow at times and it's always nicer to have the option to make changes on the fly. This is why I developed my fast and user friendly front-end SEO editor for WP called, "Front-end SEO Editor". http://chompdigital.com/wordpress-frontend-seo-plugin/

My plugin has saved me so much time when editing meta data and H1 titles across all websites and I'm sure it would do the same for others. Front-end SEO Editor works out of the box with Yoast SEO, but it can also work with any other SEO plugin that uses meta_keys. At least give it a look to see what you think.

Thanks again SEO Moz for providing this great list of useful SEO plugins and maybe someday you could add my plugin to this list of usefulness. :)

I also have a Wordpress website and I am using most of the plugins which you mention in your post and they are working great as well.I want to add some more plugins in your list which are also amazing and useful too.Akismet plugin for spam prevention,WP internal links plugin.

I am truly a fan of Yoast, I think that he does incredible work with his modules and I always recommend them in a Wordpress installation.One addition that I am looking for is a plugin to handle URL rewriting and rel="canonical" properly. There are plugins out there, but most of them are not quite up to my standards and does not achieve my desired action.

Great article! Glad to have such an extensive list including many plugins I haven't tried.

I did want to mention that it appears Wordpress has recently started recommending looking elsewhere for a 301 redirect plugin rather than Simple 301 Redirect. I've used it for a long time but I guess it hasn't been updated to work with more recent versions of Wordpress. I found Redirects is pretty similar, it works well and it also offers a CSV upload option. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirects/

Curious to know if you recommend both WordPress SEO by Yoast AND Scribe SEO? What makes it important to have Scribe as well? I already subscribe to it, but am wondering if I should maintain my account there. What value is there to have both? Please let me know!

Great list - I have to say that I agree with some of the comments - I prefer to use Yoast and take about half of these off the list. I used to use multiple progs but now I've let go of XML sitemaps, AIOSEO, and a few others. Love some of the ones on your list - have to check them out.

What a great post!I was thinking of writing a similar post - only for Joomla plugins.Just to make sure I'm not the only Joomla fan out there- is there anyone else who would be interested in that kind of post?

Hey. Well, I'd sort of be interested to see that post. But I'm more interested in understanding the benefits of Joomla over Wordpress. Everyone seems to agree that Wordpress is better for SEO, so I'd appreciate a post explaining how Joomla adds value.

I only speaking for myself guys however I tried using Joomla unfounded to be not as easy to use nor as effective in SEO. please don't think that I'm saying don't use Joomla I'm not I'm telling you that I tried it and frankly it was lacking so many things that I found by using WordPress and when I started to use WordPress I did not have the same issues as far as ease of use. However my opinion is use the platform you are comfortable with and gets results so I would like to see more information on Joomla as well there may be many people out there that had a much different experience than I had with Joomla. if I may ask you what do you prefer about Joomla over WordPress? Respectfully, Thomas Zickell

To be honest, I still prefer Wordpress.Having said that, in case you're using Joomla - you should have the best plugins to ease your work. Unfortunately, it's not an easy task at all to find decent and useful plugins for Joomla. I'll consider this.

Thanks skifr. I seem to notice that everyone in SEO prefers Wordpress and Joomla seems to be less popular. Can you tell me what it is about Joomla that people actually like? Are you able to create better looking websites with Joomla? I'm just interested in understanding the marketplace. We only consider using Wordpress for our clients at the moment.

Thanks for such a detailed post Casey - adding it to my favorites now!I have been sticking to All in One SEO Pack plugin, Akismet, Google XML sitemaps and would try out Yoast, Majestic SEO Dashboard and a couple more from this list.

Great to have this list of Wordpress plugins. I think we are ok on the SEO plugins side of things, but need a good "wordpress backup" plugin. We were using "Wordpress Backup to Dropbox" but that has been very unreliable? Can anyone help here?

Nick,Try Backup Buddy! It is a paid plugin, but its incredible. You can have scheduled backups stored via FTP, Email, Amazon, Dropbox, and more.. For us, we do a lot of ground up WordPress development, so they also have a feature that allows us to develop on our server, then easily migrate the site to a new server in just a few minutes time.

Thanks a lot Casey! Sorry for the late reply. I will definitely try backup buddy and am prepared to pay for it if it provides a reliable service. It was a shame that "Wordpress Backup to Dropbox" didn't work so well in the end. It seemed to have the right idea but also quite a few bugs.

Vaultpress I feel is better than backup buddy. So as Code Guard however just my $.02. One thing that should have been mentioned is a managed wordpress host can alleviate the need for backup plug-ins as well as security plug-ins.

Thx so much. I need to look into some of these, esp the local SEO contact page and majestic SEO Dashboard. Thx also for the social sharing options. I need to test some of these out for site speed to see which is best.

Another Social Share plugin worth a look is Active Share by OrangeSoda, which provides a box that appears on individual posts once a user has scrolled to the end. I've used it in addition to AddThis, to good effect. You can see Active Share in action if you scroll to the bottom of this post.